Anxious Teens Hoping To Give It Old College Try

The war stories are legion and, college admissions officers insist, even true:

- The father who was so embarrassed when his daughter didn`t get into the Ivy League school of her choice that he resigned from his country club rather than face up to his friends.

- The high school senior who sent in a petition bearing the signatures of 3,500 close friends, distant relatives and complete strangers, begging another prestigious university to reconsider its devastating denial.

- The parents who swear to admissions offices that, when the acceptances come out, they really, really will be atop a Himalayan mountain peak and completely unreachable, so couldn`t the college please just this once make an exception and tell them now if their son or daughter is in or out?

For many frazzled high school seniors and their frequently more overwrought parents, the crazy season is arriving this year about two weeks earlier than usual.

On Wednesday, at precisely 12:01 a.m. EDT, the nation`s most elite and competitive institutions of higher learning will, under mutual agreement, begin mailing out thousands of fat envelopes containing freshman-class acceptances and even more thousands of skinny ones with sympathetic rejections.

``Traditionally, they call it `Bloody Monday,` `` observed Charles Shields, who holds the title of career planner at Homewood-Flossmoor High School. ``But this year I guess it will be `Bloody Wednesday.` ``

The colleges used to send out the notices in mid-April, but they have gone to the earlier mailing date to give students more time to decide on the traditional May 1 acceptance deadline.

In truth, ``Bloody Whatever Day It Is`` doesn`t have quite the impact it once did.

A number of competitive colleges and universities for some years have been accepting some students as early as December on an ``early-decision``

basis, and a sizable percentage of college-bound high school seniors already know precisely where they are headed.

Still, for the majority of them-and their parents-this week marks the beginning of a two-week period of anxious mailbox vigils and hurried calls home over the lunch hour to see if ``it`` has finally arrived.

College admissions officers insist that everyone will have to wait for the mail. There will be no exceptions-well, almost no exceptions.

This year, for the first time, Harvard University says it will use a fax machine to send the bad or glad tidings to some overseas applicants.

``Can you imagine what would happen if we gave the information out over the phone and the person`s name was Smith and we gave them the decision on the wrong Smith?`` asked Carol Lunkenheimer, director of admissions at Northwestern University. ``Besides, how could we be sure we really were talking to the applicant?``

Northwestern, however, won`t have its acceptances ready by Wednesday.

``The promise is we will mail by April 15,`` Lunkenheimer said.

``Actually, we`re going to try for the . . . oh, I better not say. We`ll just get more calls from people who think they should have already heard.``

In terms of anxiety, Lunkenheimer recalls one Chicago-area mother who two years ago ripped open her son`s letter the moment it arrived and immediately realized she had done the wrong thing in depriving him the pleasure of opening his own acceptance letter.

She drove to the campus and asked the admissions office to retype and reseal the letter in a new envelope. The university obliged.

Still, some parents aren`t content to wait.

``If all the people who told us they need to know now because they will be on a mountaintop in Nepal really were there, the population of Nepal would probably be double this time of year,`` said William Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions at Harvard, which will fill a freshman class of 1,605 by accepting 2,199 of its 12,188 applicants.

Nor are post offices immune to the pressure.

``Already I`m getting kids calling early in the morning: `Is there an envelope from such-and-such? Can I come in and get it now?` `` said Marcia Williams, supervisor of delivery and collections at the Winnetka branch, which serves the highly ambitious and affluent denizens of New Trier High School.

``There is a little tenseness in the air,`` said Norman Reidel, chairman of the College Career Counseling Center at New Trier, where more than 90 percent of the school`s 752 seniors are expected to go to college.

Thirty-four have applied to Stanford, 25 to Colgate, 23 to Princeton, 19 to Duke, 18 each to Harvard, Yale, Tufts and Williams, 17 to Brown and Georgetown, and 16 to Dartmouth.

As it has in past years, New Trier held a special session two weeks ago for about 25 parents of seniors ``who expressed some interest on how to deal with stress`` over the college-admittance procedure, Reidel said. The school`s counselors frequently find themselves giving similar advice to the students.

``Basically, what we say is that you have to make the best of the situation,`` Reidel said. ``They have to realize that life is a series of ups and downs, that not getting in doesn`t doom a student to failure for the rest of his life or say anything about the job the parent has done raising his kid. ``I also tell them that graduate school is still a possibility at the institution (where they`ve been turned down), and that where they go undergraduate really isn`t that important.``

``You have to accentuate the positives,`` added Shields of Homewood-Flossmoor. ``You point out to them that you got in here, here and here.

``But a lot of kids worry that this is a test of their ability to succeed as grownups. It`s interesting to note that it`s the kids themselves who use the word `rejection.` The college admissions people use the word `denied.` ``